The
Manitoba Association for Distributed Learning and Training (MADLaT)Invites
all MADLaT members to the following FREE webinarIt is estimated that 28 million people harvest their crops on FarmVille each day, a challenge for which there is no material reward. What if we could harness this attention and motivation—this power—for education? We hear a lot about the potential for gamification to improve learning, but it is one thing to say we want to do this and another thing to know how to do it. What does it mean to gamify a course? What happens to our assignments, our objectives, and our test items? And how do we keep “fun” from trumping “learning”? This workshop will strip the concept of gamification down to its most practical concepts, map them to a real, gamified course, and help you do the same with your own examples. You’ll see that while gamification requires a philosophical and conceptual shift in our approach to curriculum design, at its heart, it is sound pedagogical practice that we already use every day in our classrooms.Richard Van Eck is the founding associate dean for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences and the Dr. David and Lola Rognlie Monson Endowed Professor in Medical Education. He has a BA in English and Psychology from the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, an MA in English from the University of North Dakota, and a PhD in instructional design and development from the University of South Alabama (USA). He has been studying games and learning since 1995 when he entered the PhD program at USA and worked as an instructional design or developer on several learning games there, including Adventures in Problem Solving (Texas interactive Media Award, 1999), and Ribbit’s Big Splash (Gulf Guardian Award 2002; Environment Education Association of Alabama’s 2002 Best Environmental Education Award). Since then he has been an researcher and designer on several other STEM games, including PlatinuMath (mathematics game for preservice teacher education), Project NEO (science game for preservice teachers), Project Blackfeather (programming game for middles school students), Contemporary Studies of the Zombie Apocalypse (mathematics game for middle school students), and Far Plane (leadership game for high school students and adults). He is a frequent keynote speaker nationally and internationally on the educational potential of video games and his publications in this area include two edited books, seven book chapters, thirteen refereed publications, six invited publications, and more than seventy-five presentations on games and learning including talks at TEDx talk and South By Southwest. In addition to his work in serious games, he has also published and presented on intelligent tutoring systems, pedagogical agents, authoring tools, and gender and technology.Handouts and resources from webinar